


On Love Alone

by amorremanet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Best Friends, Community: hc_bingo, Dark, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Abuse, F/F, Familial Abuse, Families of Choice, Family Drama, Ficlet Collection, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Multi, NaNoWriMo, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, References to Suicide, Scars, Self-Destruction, Self-Harm, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy, Triggers, Twincest, Vampires, Werewolf Turning, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:30:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 9,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>All of these ficlets were written for various hc_bingo prompts, to accompany a mix that hasn't been posted yet. The first uses, "unwanted transformation."</p><p>Chapter titles either come from the lyrics of the songs that each ficlet uses, or from the songs' titles. The first is, "Autoclave" by The Mountain Goats.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. and nothing left to burn

**Author's Note:**

> All of these ficlets were written for various hc_bingo prompts, to accompany a mix that hasn't been posted yet. The first uses, "unwanted transformation."
> 
> Chapter titles either come from the lyrics of the songs that each ficlet uses, or from the songs' titles. The first is, "Autoclave" by The Mountain Goats.

Darkness fell hours ago and despite the pervasive stillness, the softness that comes with the night, there's someone running through the cover of forest, just west of Red River's End, Pennsylvania. Running away from a cabin further into the forest, in the only place that's been cleared out. Running toward the nearest town or anywhere with people. The trees tower, looming all around her, reaching up into the unfathomable sky, scratching and clawing against the clouds as they sway in the breeze. And even so, they close in on her like her ribs tightening around her lungs.

Vanessa Van Helsing's heart pounds in her chest like the William Tell Overture—going faster and faster as she pumps her arms, tries to emulate every Olympic track star she ever watched on her parents' dilapidated black-and-white TV. There's no light anywhere—just the far-off pin-pricks of some highway or another that she's only seen a handful of times—and yet she can see perfectly. She trips around loose branches, hurtles toward the ground, and catches herself without a thought. Moving on their own, her hands hit the dirt and wet leaves, launch her into a tumble. One that gets her back up on her feet.

And she should get back to running but instead, she pauses. Slumping into the tree, she takes a series of deep breaths—tries to slow their pace, even just a little—she's getting ahead of them, moving faster than she ever has. She can't think about what that means—can't consider the word _werewolf_ , not right now—but she'll do it once she's safe and she'll be safe once she can breathe again, once she can deal with the fire that worms deep down into her muscles and twists around, drags its talons along the length of her bones. Her head spins and her stomach twists so fiercely, tangling up around itself, and she tries to keep her mind here and now.

She tries not to let herself drift back to the cabin—her family's safe-house and hunting lodge, where she's taken down more creatures than she can enumerate. She tries not to let her heartbeat turn from a simple rhythm to what she heard, what her father hissed at her from over the table; she tries not to let it thump at her, _get. out. get. out. get. out. get. out. **get. out**_ —and yet, as she doubles over, hugging her stomach, it's the only thing she can make out of the noise, or out of the banging in her chest. She doesn't have the luxury of breathing right now—of stopping for breath anyway—and she certainly doesn't have the luxury of reminiscing—but her breath comes to her in trembles, shudders, coughs, and her eyes burn, threaten to tear up.

_Zip! Thunk!_ A crossbow bolt zooms past Vanessa's ear as she tries to force herself upright again—it misses her by mere inches—and it snaps into a nearby tree, with the distinctive thump of a silver tip. She whips around—even in the dark, she can make out their forms—tall, hulking Joseph, her eldest brother, shouting that he's spotted her. Darwin, one of the middle ones, like her, packing another silver bullet into his revolver. Slight-of-build Remy, who's just barely sixteen and dwarfed by the assault rifle that he's packing. And finally, another woman, whose build is so much like Vanessa's own, who wears the same leather jacket that she does, who holds the crossbow that just shot at her— _oh, God… oh, God… oh, God_ —her twin sister, Lucy. Just looking back at her makes the wound on her side ache—or maybe that's how it's scarring itself over. 

Lucy just tried to plug her with a crossbow bolt—one that's tipped with silver, one that would either kill Vanessa in an instant now, or drag it out, make the process take its time, all long and slow and excruciating. She can't be sure—she's never watched one of her victims die. That starts Vanessa running again, puts her back on the track toward town or the road or wherever she can get—anywhere that isn't here. Leaves crunch underneath her heavy boots. She squelches the mud and soft ground without hardly sinking into it, she moves so fast. Hills aren't any trouble—she rolls down them and stumbles up, and finally, when she has no idea how long it's been, how much sweat and how many branches have gotten tangled in her hair, she staggers up one onto the road. Throws her hands up into the headlights of a car that barely stops. 

"Help me," she half-pants, half-shouts to the hideous, sickening beat of her heart. "Please… werewolf bit me, I need the ER… please. _Please_. Help me…" 


	2. Appassionata

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "restrained."  
> Song: Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, op. 57, "the Appassionata."

She expects the cops in Denton Falls to handcuff her, maybe get a little rough and hurl insults her way—either because she's an admitted perp or because she's a werewolf—but they don't. They lead her into an interview room, set her up with a styrofoam cup of searing, acidic coffee, and leave her alone for a few minutes. When two detectives show up, they don't even arrest her, though one of them lets Vanessa know that she's entitled to have a lawyer present, especially if she's going to go wandering into police stations and telling cops that she's a murderer.

If anything, these people are perfectly _nice_ to the young woman, aged twenty-three years, who's just spent the past four days in a hospital, surrounded by nurses and doctors and other patients, on a special wing for meta-human injuries and the recently Turned. It's _weird_ and it sets Vanessa's stomach on edge, makes her scrape her nails along the smooth surface of the table—even if it's nowhere near the full moon now, even if she doesn't have her claws out, she leaves white little trails behind in the gleaming chrome. At least she's not the first to have done so.

Looking up at Detective What's-Her-Name and Detective So-and-So, she just wants to _scream_ at them. Let them know that she's not crazy, that she's not making any of this up—that they can call the FBI, if they don't believe her, because she's pretty sure that they have a whole library of files on her family's work, even though they've never gotten enough evidence on them to prosecute. She's a killer and she knows that now—she never thought about what she was doing when she actually took any lives, but she _is_ a killer, it's all that she was raised to be—she's seen the effects of her family's work, now, too.

She could go on about how she saw the faces of the sort of people she's spent her whole life hunting down—how she's seen them in the hospital, more broken and more buffeted than she is now, suffering, in excruciating pain that she's only just begun to fathom… And she's done that to people. She could sob for them and put on some show to garner their empathy, but that'd defeat the purpose of coming down here in the first place—that'd probably get her some kind of plea deal, or Lord only knows what. And all she wants—all she deserves—is a one-way trip to prison. To get locked up with no hope for parole before the full moon comes and she hurts someone else.

All she's ever done is hurt people. All she's ever done is shoot the same silver bullets that came at her almost a week ago, knock vampires out with dead man's blood to give them the small mercy of being unconscious when she torched their walking corpses, set up counting traps for fae or for some of the Old World fangs and lop off their heads with cold silver blades while the grains of rice had them distracted. All she's ever done is hunt, and maim, and kill—and now she's damned to carry on that same cycle forever? Mother was right, in saying what she did on the night Vanessa left. Vanessa's shown her weakness in her inability to kill herself, to take mercy on the countless innocents she might destroy.

And since that's all she's ever done anyway, why shouldn't she be locked up? Hell, with her confession? Any District Attorney worth their damned degrees should have no trouble putting a needle full of wolfsbane concentrate in Vanessa's fucking arm.

So Vanessa says none of what's in her head. Doesn't let the cops see her sweat. Doesn't cry about how her family made her do it or beg for sympathy that she doesn't deserve. She simply asks them for a pen and paper, and writes down all of the names she can remember: Kevin Buckley, a younger werewolf, from a family of them, and her first kill; Alice Hart, a mild-mannered vampire who worked in a library; Noreen Lynch, who'd only just gotten Turned herself, and Joe and Lucy took out her Sire, some woman named Abigail Fletcher; Devin Fletcher, Foster McConnell, Lyndon Duncan, Laurence Hale, Frank Devereux, and Mitchell Lamb, from a night when her family went in together, took on an entire pack of werewolves and Vanessa had come out with the highest body count.

***

But of course, things can't be simple. But of course, Vanessa slips up in mentioning her family at all. The detectives wander out and ask her to hold on just a second—when What's-Her-Name comes back in, it's just to ask if Vanessa wants some more coffee—and some time later, a psychiatrist comes in, in their stead. She introduces herself as Doctor Audra J. Finch, a consultant with the Denton Falls Police Department, and says, _sotto voce_ , that she'd just like to ask Vanessa a few questions, nothing too invasive, just a simple assessment. Would that be all right with her?

Vanessa shrugs and doesn't see why not. She leans forward, slouching down on the table, ghosting her thumbs up and down the edge of her empty cup. It's gotten refilled three times already and no one's gotten the message, yet. The one about how they're wasting time and how anyone with any sense would just kill her before she does someone else in—but she can't say that. She can't say any of it, or she'll end up with some kind of sympathetic deal—something that gets her out of serving time, something that gets her out of actually taking the punishment that she deserves.

But Doctor Finch asks about them, so Vanessa tells the shrink about her family, about how close they were, about her Father's strong right hand and Mother's warm consolations. About how she had to keep it secret when she started _looking_ at Lucy, but how it turned out that Lucy was _looking_ back at her—not that they ever did anything but _look_ (except that they did, and the shrink arches her eyebrows like she just knows Vanessa's lying). About how she thought she _had_ to do everything that she ever did—thought that she had to go after innocent people with guns and crossbows and knives and all kinds of other nasty shit—because if she didn't, then they'd kill everyone in their own paths.

"But you've said that you recognized that they were innocent?" asks Doctor Finch, nudging her black-rimmed glasses up her nose. "You knew what you were doing was wrong, then?"

Vanessa shakes her head. "I never even questioned it. Not once. I mean, would _you_ question it, Doctor? Here they are, a bunch of freaks who kill people with their freaky fucking superpowers. You've got guns and ammo enough to make a difference. You _know_ they're not humans, even though the sure as shit look like them. Are you going to step up and save some people, or are you gonna let them have their way with the survival of our very species? Guess which option I chose, right? It's right there for you, isn't it? And that's why I should get put away."

"So what made you change your mind about your victims so radically? Radically enough to come down here, confess to killing several of them, and say that you should spend time in prison?"

Vanessa shrugs, drains her coffee, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. "Because I saw them. At the hospital. I saw them, and I saw myself, and… does it really matter why? What really matters is that I'm a killer. I deserve to be in prison. If not worse."

Finally, soon after that, she gets arrested, booked, but after that, she gets a lawyer. Some snake in the grass with a Georgia drawl who takes her case pro bono but doesn't listen when Vanessa says she doesn't want a plea deal—apparently, the bastard doesn't have to listen. Some paper from the shrink says that Vanessa's unable to assist in her own defense. When they haul Vanessa up in front of the judge, her lawyer calls her _not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect_ ; the Assistant District Attorney has no objections, says that the truly guilty parties are her parents and older brothers, who so far have evaded capture by the proper authorities; and as per the legalese agreement, Vanessa's put into the state's custody.

Just not the custody that she deserves. Limply, she jangles the handcuffs, tugs at them and bends the chain links ever-so-slightly, even though she didn't mean to do so. The bailiff escorts her to a holding cell, and from there, she gets her personal effects—though not any of the knives she gave up at her arrest—and a ride to the Donovan Psychiatric Hospital. She gets a pristine white room and a few sets of lavender-colored scrubs to wear instead of her filthy jeans an t-shirt, or her prison orange jumpsuit. They give her a set of sneakers with no laces, make her take the laces out of her boots as well and hand them over. She understands their objections to the things, but on the other hand, she doesn't. She's probably not light enough to hang herself with them.

The orderlies' next move is to leave her alone for a little while, let her settle in before she gets a chance to meet her roommate. All Vanessa does—all she has the energy to do—is flop down to the bed and huddle herself away in the corner of the room. She shuts her eyes, presses her cheek into the smooth, freezing surface of the wall, and whispers, _so much for law enforcement, huh._


	3. why? I don't know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "post-traumatic stress disorder."  
> Song: "Round Here" — Counting Crows.

Once they let her out of the hospital, it's supposed to get better. It doesn't. Not really—and how can it? How could she expect it to? Everywhere Vanessa looks, everything looks like a wolf. Looks like _the_ wolf—the one who bit her. Christmas lights in storefront windows gleam like its eyes, even when they're green or red instead of yellow. Even when they flash like there's some electric current pulsing forward, ever forward, coursing down the string.

One misplaced gust of frozen air howling over the back of her neck and she's right there—back in that thicket, back on that night, back to square one all over again, slouching at the hips as she stares the thing down, hearing trees rustle as it darts through them, feeling its saliva bead up underneath her tangled ponytail and slither across her skin, seeing darkness all around and wincing, doubling over at a crosswalk because it hurts—it _hurts_ —her whole side aches, down by her hip, by the pale, angry scar with the jagged fang-marks.

Someone puts a hand on her shoulder and asks if she's all right, and despite the deep, quivering breaths she takes, Vanessa can't come up with an answer for him. She just nods and clenches her hands tighter on her plastic grocery bags, waits for the light to change and sprints the ten blocks to her apartment.

It's shitty, her apartment, the one so graciously acquired for her by the State Department of Corrections, because they couldn't let her out of the hospital without somewhere to go. It's shitty, but at least it's home. With the rent that she helps pay out of the account that Grandma Ingrid set up for her, left some unfathomable chunk of money in, that her parents can't ever touch. It's not enough to put Vanessa up in a mansion, but it's enough that she can live on it without needing to work. So far, anyway, and at least, she's fine for now.

She'll need to get a job eventually, or find some means of acquiring income for herself—but what does she know about the so-called real world? How to make tea and keep her mandated therapy appointments. How to buy the food that she has to remind herself to eat. How to kill people who don't deserve it—in the middle of her cramped kitchenette, she shudders at that thought, has to talk herself down from some kind of crazy tree because that thought takes her back again—she sees the dead eyes and the lifeless bodies, flashes of faces that she can't forget, that she shouldn't forget because she killed them…

She ought to remember them forever, remember their faces, because if she forgets, then she could lapse again. So, Vanessa sighs. Scoops the tea leaves up in a ball infuser made out of some wire-mesh that looks like the covering of the safe-houses old screen door. Drops the ball into her steaming mug of water and wraps her hands around it. Sits at the table and lets the warmth hit her hands a bit too hard—she tries to ignore her screaming hip because it's not real. It's not real. The pain's not real and there's nothing wrong with her. There's nothing wrong with her. There's nothing real that's wrong with her or with her hip; she's just making things up. It's just her imagination getting the better of her again.

There's nothing wrong with her except for everything that is. Except for everything that keeps her up at night or rouses her from sleep with the memory of those gleaming yellow eyes—or worse, of her father's, all cold and greet and failing to recognize his own daughter, staring at her as though at a stranger… Before her tea's fully steeped, Vanessa ends up across the hall, bangs on Adelaide's door and asks if she has a few spare minutes. A shoulder to cry on. Anything at all.

Adelaide smiles and shepherds her in, sets her up on the sofa. "For you, Nessie, I've got all the spare time in the world."


	4. don't lose your nerve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: counseling.  
> Song: "Exit Music (For A Film)" — the Vitamin String Quartet (originally Radiohead).

The counselor she's been assigned to wears tortoiseshell glasses and her chestnut hair tied up in a floppy bun. She seems nice enough and all, but therapy still claws at Vanessa's nerves like a rabid badger. Sitting opposite Doctor Wolf makes her feel sick—not just in the institutionalized, “I’ve just been in a fucking psychiatric hospital and walked away with a handful of diagnoses and ‘sick’ is what they call us because it's mostly value-neutral” sort of way, either.

Oh, sure, it’s a reminder of that—everything about the office is a reminder of that. Every patient's sketch hanging on the mottled sea-foam walls of Doctor Wolf’s office just hits some gut-level, bone-deep instinct to run for the hills, as fast as she can, head for wherever she can get where she might not have to feel her stomach twisting itself up in knots over how the whole room reminds her that it's not been that long since some fuck-head in a lab coat deemed her, “no longer a danger to herself or others.”

And it does make her sick. It makes her want to run to the nearest bathroom, hunker down on her knees, and vomit—it makes her certain that she's going to have to cut this appointment short from puking in the wastebasket. Her stomach squirms a little harder with everything that she tells her doctor, with everything that she confesses—even if it isn’t much. She talks around the issues—says she’s struggling with remembering to eat, but doesn’t mention that she stills the eyes of the wolf—the gleaming, yellow eyes of the beast that bit her. She only mentions that she still has an awful lot of trouble reminding herself that the wolf wasn’t just a wolf, but a _were_ wolf, not a beast, but a person and that she can’t know the circumstances around them biting her.

Doctor Wolf leans forward in her seat, twirling her pen around in her fingers in long, slow rotations as though inexpert and unaccustomed to this action. As though she so desperately needs something—anything—to do with her hands that she’ll take stumbling all over herself instead of making herself look even vaguely professional. She takes a deep breath, combing her eyes up and down over Vanessa’s whole body, over how she’s folded up with her knees to her chest, all slumping back into the sofa’s cushion—because that’s really gonna make Vanessa feel more at ease about how here they are again.

Here they are _again_ with the impossible questions. The questions that are so impossible because Vanessa can’t even fathom how to answer them. How is she _doing_? Well, how is she even _supposed_ to be doing, considering what she’s been through? How do most people say they’re doing when they’ve lost their homes, their families, their ability to sleep at night, not just because they’ve been Turned, but also because they’ve had to come to terms with how everything they’ve known is wrong, how they’ve killed _people_ and not just _things_? What in the Hell is Vanessa even supposed to say to a question like that?

_Well, I don’t really know how I’m doing, Doctor. I don’t have any recourse to judge that, don’t you think? Anyway, I don’t have a job. I can’t start my volunteer work yet because you won’t write a doctor’s note for me and, even if you would, the shelter I’m assigned to hasn’t had office hours that synch up with my fucked to Hell sleeping schedule quite yet. Which I’m trying to work on fixing, but, y’know, it’s sort of difficult because I can’t fucking sleep that well, but I guess everything’s going about as okay as I’m allowed to hope for because I’m not dead, I’m not actively suicidal all that often or actively thinking about self-harm, I have a friend who probably shouldn’t even be my friend, and I can still make tea and dinner._

Yeah, because _that_ doesn’t scream that there’s more wrong than therapy can fucking help. Just exactly how ridiculous does that sound? Moreover: exactly how ridiculously unbalanced does all of that sound, because with a gun to her head, Vanessa’s guess would be _very_.

“You’re missing the point of therapy, Vanessa,” Doctor Wolf says with that heavy sigh of hers—the one that all but screams, _I just want to help you_. “You keep missing it, too—we keep ending up here over and over and over again. You might not need to tell me _everything_ , but you need to be, on some level, honest with me. The less honest you are, the less this process is going to work for you. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out in the end.”


	5. I would bear it all broken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "scars."  
> Song: "Down By The Water" — the Vitamin String Quartet (originally The Decemberists).

Even in the afterglow—even after she's had her dose of Real-Flavor Prescription Blood Substitute—Adelaide's fingers hit Vanessa's skin like ice, tracing up the curve of her spine, down her arms, back up and around the softening angles of her shoulder-blades. Vanessa shivers underneath them, but nods to say that Adelaide can go on, mutters that it's okay, she likes the way Adelaide's fingers feel—at least, she likes it until Adelaide trips up and scrapes one of her diamond-hard nails down one of Vanessa's knotted, off-pink scars—the one that sits on the back of her neck and the top of her spine, right where Adelaide's swept her hair aside.

It's an old scar, fading into her skin and everything, but it hasn't healed the way that Vanessa's wounds have since her Turning—it hasn't ever gone away and her doctors say that it never will; lycanthropy's healing factor only applies to new injuries—and underneath Adelaide's arctic touch, it feels brand fucking new. Vanessa's nerves light up and she shudders. Her lungs convulse, flopping like dead fish inside her chest; she curls up, knees digging toward her stomach, burrowing her fingers into her shins from holding onto her legs so tightly. But she says that it's okay, so the touches keep coming. Adelaide presses on, presses her finger harder into one of the knots. She drags her finger down the knots and it's still okay.

It's okay until Adelaide asks where it came from and Vanessa shrugs, buries her cheek into one of the pillows and stares out the window at the moonless night. "Long story," she says by way of half-assed explanation, by way of saying that she really doesn't want to talk about it more than this—but Adelaide just brings her thumb into things. Pushes it into the knot that's right over a knot on Vanessa's spine. She drops her other hand to Vanessa's side and rests it over another scar—first, there's the long, jagged one over her ribcage, but Adelaide doesn't stop there. She only holds on for a moment before she ghosts her palm down to Vanessa's hip, down to the curved scar from where the werewolf bit her. Her Turning scar.

Vanessa flinches at the first touch—claws into her own legs and feels the skin close up where she punctures it before any blood's welled up or tried to spill out—her heart races, pounding harder than it has since the last full moon, maybe even harder than that. She can't tell. All she knows is that, for how hard it gets, how fast and how intent, the beating starts to fade as Adelaide traces one finger around the entire scar, over all of the little knots, the spaces of unmarred skin between each puncture wound. Vanessa draws in a long, deep breath, and all her muscles lose their tension. She stretches her legs out again, nudges back into Adelaide's front, relaxes into her arms, her cold embrace. Gently, she squeezes Vanessa's hip.

Adelaide lets the scar go after that and, in a long moment of silence, just holds her, just snakes her arm around Vanessa's waist. Lips buffing up the skin of Vanessa's neck, she whispers, "You're still so young—I always forget how much you've been through until I get to see your scars."


	6. Concerto No. 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "electrocution"  
> Song: Handel's "Concerto No. 10 in D Minor."

Coming to again hits like a burst of lightning, shocks Vanessa around with a gasp and a start—she blinks up at the ceiling and she knows it—she knows the cabin without needing to think about it—but why is she here, she was in the forest? How did she get here? Who moved her? Would any of the family have done it? Could they have found her? She should be dead, she should be done for, she _should be dead_ … Why isn't she dead?

She can't think about that right now. But she's alive and she's in bed—in her own bed, she knows not from seeing anything, but from the smell of the sheets—and that's so weird, how she can smell things. Everywhere, she smells things—the scents batter into her, slither down her throat and unfurl in her gut, along her bones, twist themselves all up and around her limbs. Spill out in her marrow. From the varnish on the bedside table to the beef in the oven downstairs, she can smell absolutely _everything_ … She hears everything, too. Skittering bugs. Rodents that may be in the walls, but might be outside, too, for all that's worth. The screech of some lone owl and someone turning off a car's engine. No, not a car. A pick-up truck—the engine's too heavy, too loud, to just be any car.

Heightened senses—notably the increased sense of smell. The bedroom's light isn't on, either. There's something filtering in from outside, but it's just moonlight—Vanessa can't believe she's only noticing it now. She can see perfectly. She can make out all the lines and whorls in the wood. How long has she even been out? She knows before she looks at it that the moon isn't full—but it was when she was last awake—so it's been at least a day, then? Or maybe it's only been a few hours, but it's long enough that she wouldn't have to deal with any side-effects? Or maybe the first full moon doesn't make a bit of difference?

And how the Hell would she be able to know something like that? Why does it matter—why is she worrying about the full moon? Why does it dig its talons into her bones and scratch up the length of her neck? _Why does it matter_ what's going on with the goddamn moon? How, just— _Oh God, no._

No. _No_ —she can't think about that right now. She _won't_ think about it right now. She can't think about it because it's not going to be real, it's pointless, that would never happen to her. No one in the family would allow it to happen to her. They know all the rumors, all the potential cures. They wouldn't bring her back here, not without being able to fix her first—which they obviously haven't done, if she's seeing, hearing, smelling everything the way that she is. There's something wrong with her. There's something wrong with her. There's something different, something lethal, something _wrong_ …

The word rings out in her head, for all she doesn't want to think it: _werewolf_.

But she can't be. But the family would never let that happen. But maybe she shouldn't have gone out to hunt the thing alone. But maybe none of that fucking matters because she _did_ go out, and she _did_ try to take it out herself, and now there's something wrong with her, and it might be that she's become one of the filthy fucking _things_ that her family's hunted since before her Great-Great-Grandfather took out Dracula, since before his own Great-Great-Grandfather helped make the Netherlands vampire-free.

Vanessa's entire body aches. She claws her way onto her side and forces herself to face the window and curl up, has to drag her legs up and close to her chest. Even drawing breath makes her head reel, makes her stomach want to plummet out of her, down to somewhere it might not have to feel so sick—and someone's coming. The footsteps in the hallway bang like thunder as they trample up the stairs, down the hall—her door creaks open and she's hit with the mixed stench of meat, and smoke, and leather-cleaner, and pumpkin spice body wash, with the sound of heavy boots that she knows are the same ones she wears without any idea how she knows that. Without any desire to find out how, because it might mean that she's right, that the something wrong with her can't get fixed.

As the mattress dips underneath another body, as whoever it is shunts themself back into the wall, there's a heavy huff that matches all of Vanessa's suspicions: Lucy's come to see her. Those are Lucy's fingers nudging her comforter aside and trailing up her leg, over the muscles and the stubble to where her short pajamas start, to the seam on the outside of her thigh. Vanessa sighs but can't make herself un-tense, much less relax—she can't get her breaths to come any longer—and there's something electric, now, about her sister's fingertips. Something that means Vanessa feels every single ridge making up her fingerprints.

"How are you feeling, Princess," Lucy says in a voice that doesn't match the question, a voice that already knows the answer it's going to get.

All Vanessa does is shrug, mutter that she could be doing worse, she guesses, and she's alive, so there's that. "Not that it's worth that much, I guess. Because… I mean… just because."

"Because there's not that, is there?" Lucy points out, traces a spiral pattern that nudges the hem of Vanessa's shorts around. "There's not that, and you know it, and… Can you sit up yet."

"Wouldn't know. I didn't try." But she tries for Lucy, because her sister asks, because she wouldn't leave her sister waiting on something that's made her voice wobble like that—Vanessa trembles all over, but she makes herself sit up. Gets rewarded with the electric shock of her sister's hands knotted up in her t-shirt, of Lucy yanking her over into a hard kiss. One that she reciprocates, sliding her lips around Lucy's, giving Lucy the breathy noises that she likes when she bites Vanessa's lip. She leans forward into it, resting a hand on Lucy's knee for balance—but she jerks back when Lucy's hand falls down to squeeze her hip.

For a moment, all they can do is stare at each other—lock eyes until Vanessa can't take it anymore, until he has to duck her chin, drop her gaze down to her lap. How can Lucy recognize her when she isn't sure that she'd recognize herself, given half a chance? Lucy should run, should dart downstairs and tell their Father that it's true—there's something different about Vanessa, something wrong with her, something that deserves only one word and that word is _werewolf_ —but instead, she reaches over, squeezes Vanessa's wrist.

She whispers, "Maybe it didn't take, Princess. Maybe it… Maybe you're going to be fine. Maybe we won't have to do anything about it."


	7. but that's not unusual (then give me another word for it)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "time travel gone wrong"  
> Song: "Diamonds And Rust" — Blackmore's Night (originally Joan Baez).

The first full moon Vanessa survives is the worst one—the whole process is new to Vanessa, her joints and muscles burn in anticipation of it, her stomach's so unsettled that she can't eat much all day and still runs out of her group therapy session so she can throw up in the relative peace of the bathroom—but all three of the fuels that happen while she's at the hospital are a pretty special sort of terrible.

They lock her up in an isolated ward with padded walls. They leave her alone and say that there will be an orderly waiting for her in the morning, with a first aid kit and breakfast and anything else that she might need. They handcuff her, not that it matters because she breaks the things as soon as the moon comes up, as soon as the light filters through the windows and a howl claws its way up out of her throat. That's when she blacks out, too—all she knows about what happens is that she doesn't turn into a full wolf. She can tell because when she wakes up in the morning, all scarred and bruised and gnawed up, there's no fur and all the bite marks on her arms look mostly human. Harder, perhaps a bit more forceful, but mostly human. And the orderly doesn't come until she presses some button on the wall—until she presses it several times.

One of the biggest mistakes that Vanessa makes, though, is thinking that the moon's going to get any easier to deal with, once she gets out of the hospital, once she's allowed to try and make it on her own. Because there's the rub, isn't it? She's on her own, now. Even having a vampire acquaintance across the hall isn't that much help, because it's not like she can just ask Adelaide to sit with her. It's not like she can go, _so, hey, excuse my presumption over here, but do you have the next full moon free, I need someone who can try to keep me from clawing myself up like a trapped animal_ , and expect to maintain any modicum of dignity. Much less expect the relationship to go anywhere positive.

And screw it, maybe she wants their relationship to go somewhere positive. Maybe she hates it when Adelaide's eyes comb over her like she's seeing someone she can't make heads or tails of, someone she maybe wants to trust but can't. Vanessa's held back enough by her last name, by the fact that no meta-human in their right mind trusts a Van Helsing. She doesn't need to have any additional trouble. She doesn't need Adelaide to trust her any less.

But still, it'd be nice to have someone stay with her. It'd be nice to remember what happens during the full moon, in any way—every morning after, Vanessa has her injuries and no memories of how she got them. She locks herself down well enough that she knows she's not gone out. Any blood she finds under her nails always tastes the same when she licks it off, and that taste is one she recognizes as her own. But she doesn't know what else happens, beyond what little she concludes. All Vanessa knows is that when the world goes black around her—when she falls out of control of her body—she ends up dropping into memories even more than she does from blinking Christmas lights or the forest smell that she finds around certain parks. She might end up back on a hunt, or back in the clearing where the werewolf bit her, Turned her…

Or she might end up back in Lucy's bed, curling into a body that wasn't hers but mirrors her own so intimately, only differs in the placement of scars and freckles. She might find herself twining her fingers up in her sister's hair, sucking on her sister's lower lip, letting her fingers wander all over her sister's body and into her—and when she comes to in the morning, Vanessa always feels empty, lonely, half-dead or dying. Feels this gaping hole in her chest, as though someone's dug a ditch where her heart and lungs should be.

But she forces herself to sit up, claws her way to standing, and bandages herself up. She puts on the tea, puts bread into the pop-up toaster. Because she can't go back, for all her mind might go there when she can't control it, and there's no use—none, no use whatsoever—in reminiscing.


	8. I take it from his whisper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "family."  
> Song: "Your Ghost" — Greg Laswell.

The first person Vanessa tells about Lucy is the shrink whose great insight and opinions get her sent to the state hospital in the first place. At that, she only mentions it in some vague way—hints at the fact that they slept together, but sticks to euphemisms like _we were close_ and _we knew each other best of all_ and other things it's possible to misconstrue. No one in the hospital bothers to ask about the incest—no one asks about her bond with Lucy beyond, _so you and your sister were close? how close is **close**?_ , and accepting more garden variety answers like, _I would've died for her_ instead of the whole truth and nothing else.

The first person Vanessa _really_ tells about Lucy is Adelaide, and she tells her everything. Not that she means to do so when they start.

When they start, it's just a night like any other. It's just one more gathering where they let the conversation go where it will. They're both up late, so they're curled up on Vanessa's sofa with a mug of coffee and a wineglass full of Real-Flavor Blood Substitute, and Vanessa admits that there's something she can't talk to her therapist about, for all she thinks that Doctor Wolf might well suspect it. At least, she suspects that Doctor Wolf has some idea about how Vanessa's not telling her something—"But what am I supposed to tell her, Dells?" she says, sighs out over her coffee, because it's still a bit too hot for her liking. "Nobody would understand—there's a reason why I say shit like, _it's a family thing_."

"Because it's a family thing and you want to play that close to the chest, because that's all you've ever known how to handle family things?" Only pausing for a sip of her Blood Substitute, Adelaide throws in the upward inflection, but it's not a question, not even remotely. The little quirk of her thin, pale lips says as much, even though she doesn't. "The coven used to be the same way. You don't talk to outsiders about coven business unless you want to bring them into the coven—which was a mess and a half, and part of the reason why we got so numerous in the first place. It's harder than you think, not opening up to people about what's on your mind and what you live with. It's harder on you than you think, too."

"But it's not the same, is it? The coven and your blood family?" Vanessa has to ask this because she really doesn't understand. She doesn't see how there's such a connection between the two concepts. Blood family, she'd die for in a heartbeat—even now, some several months after they cast her out. Blood family, Vanessa has bloodied her hands in killing for, to the point that they'll probably never be clean. A coven, she's never had and never will, but should she ever find a pack? She's certain that nothing could compare to the ferocity with which she's loved her blood family.

All Adelaide does is shake her head. "They're not the same, no, but… probably not because of the reasons that you're thinking, Sweetheart." A sigh, and she combs her free hand's fingers back through her long, dusky hair. She brushes it back off her shoulders without trouble. "A coven is a blood family, for most vampires. All the werewolves I've ever talked to said the same about their pack—except for you, of course. But your situation is pretty unique, as far as I know. Most werewolves don't go around, just biting people and Turning them. It'd be like one of my people Turning someone without letting them know that it's not all a bunch of sparkles, and black velvet, and cape-twirling, and atrocious Romanian accents."

Vanessa huffs in amusement and rolls her eyes. "You've really got it out for those goddamn blood-chasers, don't you, Dells."

"I don't have it _out_ for them, _Nessie_ ," she says and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. "I'd just have to ask them why the Hell they _want_ this when they know the reality of it. I can't judge them, I wanted it too or Margaret never would've Turned me… but it's more complicated than, 'I want to be a vampire.' If someone wants it just to have it, then they're not prepared to handle what our gifts and curses really entail. I'm sorry, but they're just not."

"You mean that you just don't want them in your family, don't you?" She smiles a bit as Adelaide supposes that there's some kind of truth to that—but that goes away as soon as Vanessa has to turn back to the issue at hand. "But it's still not that simple, right? There's a difference between a coven becoming your family and blood family in the way that I'm talking about. I mean… when the coven becomes your family, there's a transfer of blood and everything, so you become related, and I get that—but you still know other things. You know that there are other options. But that's not what a blood family is, sometimes. Or… at least, it wasn't how things went for me. I guess my situation's pretty unique there, too."

"Less so than you'd think, unfortunately. Isolating victims is one of the favored tactics of domestic abusers—both in the sense of parents and not."

As she says this, the darkest expression that Adelaide's ever worn graces her thin face, and for a long moment, she goes perfectly still, perfectly silent. It's not her own experience making her look like this—Vanessa's heard enough about Adelaide's dead husband to know that he wasn't an abuser, just a gay man married to a lesbian in a time when neither of them could be open about their orientations—but on the other hand, it might be so much worse that Adelaide's not talking about something that happened to her. That she's talking about something that happened to a member of her coven—her _family_ —makes her look the same way that Vanessa's felt when anything's ever threatened one of her siblings. Especially when anything's ever threatened Lucy, her Lucy.

"She really was mine for a while, too," Vanessa says, voice barely above a whisper as she sips at her coffee. "I say that I would've died for any of them—and I would have, make no mistake—but… if I would've had to die for any of them, I would've died for her. Still kind of shocked Mom didn't try to guilt me into offing myself by playing the, 'don't let your sister see you like this anymore' card about my getting turned." She pauses, thinks a moment, sighs. "She's why I can't tell Doctor Wolf that much about anything, about my family. I mean, how many ways are there to tell your therapist that you used to fuck your sister without it sounding like something she has to take out of context and misconstrue?"

Adelaide shrugs and slouches into the sofa cushion. Drains her wineglass. "Well, you could try just being open about it, but telling her that… considering the circumstances? It could've been a lot worse." She blinks out at the wall where a TV should probably go, gets a wry little smirk. "I mean, at least you weren't fucking one of your brothers, right? All of them sound like they leave a lot to be desired. You had the self-respect to sleep with a family member who wasn't a complete tool."

Vanessa lobs a throw pillow at her, and effortlessly, Adelaide catches it. Shaking her head, trying to choke back a snicker, Vanessa supposes that Adelaide has a point. "But if you tell anyone about this, I swear to God, I will eat garlic for a week _just_ because you hate it so fucking much."


	9. my brother, my killer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "Stockholm syndrome"  
> Song: "Famous Blue Raincoat" — Tori Amos (originally Leonard Cohen).

Slouching onto Adelaide's kitchen table, ready to throw her hands in the air and just give up entirely, Vanessa sighs. She shoves her notebook away, but Adelaide catches it, arches an eyebrow—in response to which, Vanessa only says, "I have no goddamn idea how to do this assignment for the Doc."

"Can therapists even hand out assignments like that?" Adelaide sips at her mug of Blood Substitute and refuses to take that goddamn eyebrow down. Jesus, she's skeptically amused; Vanessa gets the point already; there's no more reason why Adelaide has to keep driving it home. "I'm just thinking that… they're not teachers. Since when can they give out homework?"

"Since Doctor Wolf got possessed with some idea that she should totally give me some fucking homework." Vanessa has to catch her notebook when Adelaide slides it back, then flips to a new page. One that she hasn't scrawled three false starts to this letter on already. "I guess part of it is that writing a letter to anyone I care about mostly means writing to you or my family, and I actually talk to you, so what's the point in writing a damn letter full of my secret thoughts and feelings or… whatever I'm supposed to be getting down in this thing?"

Adelaide snickers more than she has any right to, under the circumstances. "Well, you could always write a cycle of sonnets about my shimmering golden locks and how I'm the fairest of them all and your one wish is to get in my bed again. Not that you're barred from my bed, but you can't be Petrarch or Dante unless Beatrice or Laura is going to play hard to get." She pauses for another sip, smirks at Vanessa over the rim of her mug. "And I'm more than happy to pretend that if it motivates your poetic muse."

Vanessa rolls her eyes. "I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure that's a bad joke."

Dante rings a bell, at least, but Vanessa's pretty sure, from what she remembers Grandma Ingrid saying about it, that his _Inferno_ isn't what Adelaide's talking about here. For one thing, it's too long to be a sonnet. For another thing, it's probably more interesting than a bunch of overly-rhymed feelings about some love interest. Vanessa drags her eyes up and down Adelaide's face for a moment, searching for any indication that she might be taking this somewhere. Unfortunately, she comes up very empty-handed.

"Either way?" she says and flops onto the table, rests her cheek on her forearms. "I never really got too far past, 'The cat sat on the mat' and it's not like I have a huge pool of references here. The Western Canon-thing wasn't exactly useful for the hunting lifestyle and I never really wanted to read anything much more advanced than _Harry Potter_ paperbacks and Batman comics."

"You know, _Harry Potter_ is actually more complicated than a lot of people give it credit for—"

"And I don't want to talk about it right now because it's really not helping me with _this_ abomination." Huffing, she wriggles an arm out from under her head and jabs the butt of her pen at the notebook. "I mean… what the Hell am I supposed to say in a letter to, I don't know… my big brother. One of the assholes. Eenie, meenie, miney, I pick Darwin."

"Well," Adelaide says and takes a long swig out of her mug. "I'm not your therapist, but I believe the point of the exercise isn't to write down what you're _supposed_ to write. It's to write down what you really feel and what you really want to say to eenie, meenie, miney Darwin Van Helsing. Cathartic exercises generally want to make you just air all the dirty laundry you wouldn't want anybody getting their hands on."

"Well, then, that's the whole fucking problem, isn't it." Vanessa sits up with a grunt. "How the Hell do you write down something like, 'Dear brother, I forgive you for trying to kill me that one time, I know you only did it because you felt like you had to, also I'm still sorry for all the times you kept Joey from smacking me and Lucy around, even if you used them to manipulate the shit out of us, we really should've tried harder to defend ourselves'—I mean… Dells, how do I write something like that down without sounding like a total fucking _head-case_?"

Adelaide shrugs. "Maybe the answer is to stop trying to avoid sounding like a total fucking head-case," she says. "Maybe, if you're going to think of yourself as a total fucking head-case? You should get _all_ of that out there, plus the fucking head-case thing, because maybe? Those are the sort of things that you're in therapy to be _dealing_ with?"

Maybe she has a point, but all Vanessa gives Adelaide is the satisfaction of watching her get writing.


	10. Symphony No. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "motion sickness"  
> Song: Beethoven's "Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major, Op. 55"

Medication for lycanthropy comes in essentially two flavors: made of side-effects and pain, and completely ineffective.

Strictly speaking, the latter doesn't sound all that terrible—except for the part where it, too, would have side-effects, and if Vanessa has to suffer either way, then she wants that agony to count for something. She wants it to make some kind of difference that she's going to end up stuck with a bunch of side-effects that come along and punch her in the gut.

To be fair, some days are better than others. And some days make Vanessa want to curl up in a ball and die.

Some days, she wakes up in sweats that have nothing to do with her nightmares, but come from the medications and their side-effects, the fever that she's running because of how some fucking thing-or-other has to go to work on her body. For all the good it does her, she tries her best to fight the heat. She ties her hair back and still ends up with it caked and cleaving to her neck, sticky and salty and nauseating.

Some days, she soaks through her sheets while in a tank-top and panties—if she can stomach putting on that much, because it's always likely that she won't be able to handle being in her own skin, it's so hot, so stifling—and some days, she can't even think about getting up to change them because her body aches too much and her head is spinning like she's just gotten off a merry-go-round that went at Mach ten.

Some days, Vanessa doesn't have to leave the bed before she feels nauseated, before the urge to throw up overwhelms her, before her head reels from scents down the hall or out in the street, before she's certain that she'll never make it out the front door without vomiting. She has to force herself just to go knock on Adelaide and Madison's door, just to ask if they've got anything around that might settle her stomach a little.

Some days, Vanessa's grateful beyond words that Adelaide's a freelancer, that she works from home, that Madison doesn't mind it if her roommate comes and goes at odd hours from looking after her sick werewolf best friend.

Some days, she thinks she should have something to say by way of thanking Adelaide because no one else would do this kind of shit for her—but the words don't come up because, instead, she ends up puking in the toilet or the wastebasket by the bed while Adelaide sighs, kneels behind her on the freezing tiles or nudges up to her back, whispers to her and holds back Vanessa's tangled mess of hair. Adelaide deserves some kind of thanks for everything she does, but Vanessa can't open her mouth without something she hasn't eaten crawling up her throat.

And even when she's done upchucking, Vanessa can't spit it out. She feels too sick, too ready to vomit all over again—and even if she didn't, there's still the problem of how to pick words that don't sound trite or—worse than that, sickening in a way these side-effects only wish that they could be— _dependent_.


	11. Andante.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt used: "death."  
> Song: Sibelius's "Lemminkäinen Suite, Op. 22: The Swan of Tuonela."

The dead leaves don't crunch underneath Vanessa's boots on the way back to the cabin. It's rained too much in the past few days for them to crackle. She stomps on twigs, just for the sake of making something crack, for the sake of making something break. Something _should_ break—as she and Darwin and Joey wander back through the night, back to safety, Vanessa's only certain of that one thing. That one thing, and the ground beneath her feet, and the way she breaks the twigs. And even those things might not be as certain as they seem—they could just be her imagination. They could be her mind playing tricks on her.

Nothing reacts to the noise she makes, so maybe she isn't making it. And nothing comes out of the dark to make them regret what they've just done. What she's just done.

Darwin holds the cabin door open for her like she's some kind of fucking high-class lady. And Vanessa can't even protest because, skulking into the cabin, she trembles. Once she's unloaded—once she's taken off the weapons slung across her back and shoulders—she hugs herself around the stomach. Lets Darwin shepherd her into the kitchen, sit her down and put on the tea—some herbal concoction of their grandmother's, something designed to soothe the nerves, as though anything could make Vanessa feel any better about it, any better about what's happened tonight and what's going on. Vanessa's fifteen—she's only fifteen and she's just seen something terrible.

She wraps her hands around the steaming mug, startles and almost knocks it over when it's actually hot, when the warm ceramic snaps back against her palms. Vanessa's fifteen. Only fifteen, just like Darwin's only sixteen. She's never felt so small, so young, so weak before. She's only fifteen and her sixteen-year-old brother's seen so much more than she has; he's done what she's just done so many other times before, so many times since he was fourteen; and Joey's done it even more than that—sometimes, Vanessa even thinks that Joey _likes_ it, that it's not about saving people for him but about taking lives, about watching the lights leave eyes and hearing the shudders of death rattle out of throats.

And nothing changes the one certain thing that keeps ringing out in Vanessa's mind as Darwin rubs at her shoulder, as she tries not to picture the cold, dark look in those eyes that wouldn't close: she's fifteen and she's just killed someone. She's fifteen and she's shot someone through the heart with a silver bullet. All the training she's endured has built up, built up, and come to its natural conclusion in this simple fact, this action she can't take back. She's fifteen and she's just killed someone.

"Some _thing_ ," Joey corrects her and sits down with his cup of coffee. His eyes are steel grey, the same way that their Father's are steely, and in the moonlight filtering through the window, his entire face is Grim Reaper pale. "You didn't kill some _one_ —you killed some _thing_. You killed a monster tonight, Vanessa. It would've killed _people_ if we'd allowed it to live, and that's why it had to die. Welcome to the family."

"You're probably going to think about it for a while," Darwin says, gently squeezing her shoulder again, rubbing at the curve of it, giving Vanessa a small smile that says, without question, _I'm proud of you_. "And I mean, it might not ever stop? My first kill stuck with me for a while. I still think about it sometimes. But all that matters? All you have to tell yourself? Is that we did the right thing tonight. You did the right thing. Who knows how many people you saved tonight?"

Vanessa supposes that she doesn't know how many people she's saved. What she doesn't suppose—at least, not aloud—is that she has no idea how many dead people she's supposed to have gotten justice for, either—she has no idea how many lives her victim took. If he took any at all.


End file.
